Thursday, March 14, 2013

Peace, Perfection, and Purity

I got e-mail the other day from someone I'd quoted in a previous post, Scott from Chicago, who'd urged Ta-Nehisi Coates (and presumably other African-Americans) to play nice:

I am starting to have misgivings about articles like these: All that is
good in the world (that I have observed) comes from tolerance and a
willingness to forgive. Nothing ever good stems from quests for
perfection and purity.

I wrote that I have misgivings about people who make such recommendations, and Scott asked me what those misgivings were. I didn't go into that at length in the earlier post, partly out of laziness and partly because I thought most of my readers wouldn't need to be told. But since he asked, it seems like a good idea to explain. What follows is a slightly longer version of my reply to him.

I'm not sure what "tolerance and a willingness to forgive" have to
do with it. I think most African-Americans, for example, would be perfectly
happy to "tolerate" white people if white people would just stop being
racist. (I know that's how I feel about heterosexuals, as a gay man: I get along fine with many or most heterosexuals. The bigots just need to stop being bigots.) I think it is very significant that the request to refrain from
racist behavior is considered a counsel of "perfection and purity."

As
for being willing to forgive, I think it's reasonable to expect people to recognize and admit they've done something wrong before
one forgives them. Since so many white people indignantly deny that
they've done or said something racist, no matter what they do, I think
forgiveness would be premature. Not all white people do this, of course, but I'm not talking about them: I'm talking about those who think you're only a racist if you've ever owned a slave or lynched somebody.

The
requirement of "tolerance" also interests me because it implies
that white people, for example, are somehow disadvantaged, even
oppressed, by black people's alleged intolerance of them. But what TNC
is calling for (if I understand him correctly) is not intolerance of
white people, it's intolerance of racism, and I don't see any reason why
racism should be tolerated. It can be forgiven if someone actually asks
for forgiveness. But I see very little (if any) of that. Polls continuously
show that most white Americans believe that racism is no longer a
problem in the US, and that's absurd.

There's a similar line about "guilt." Criticize someone for racism or
sexism, he may protest that you're just trying to make him feel guilty.
Not at all. I just want him to stop being racist or sexist. I'm probably obtuse, but I've always been baffled when I hear white men talking about how they were made to feel guilty for being white or male. Maybe they were, but I've never gotten that feeling either from anti-racists or women, and I've always been a major guilt junkie. What they wanted was for me to change my behavior. And my attitudes, if at all possible. I found it quite possible.

P.S. A flood of rants about the new "Mexican" Pope on Yes, You're Racist's Twitter feed. But then someone tweeted "These people ... are frightening. Following @YesYoureRacist makes us non US think all white Americans are vile racists." The blame for stereotyping should fall on the person who stereotypes, however. As Yes, You're Racist replied, "But I'm a white American ..."